“To get the full value of joy, you must have someone to divide it with.” – Mark Twain

I was reading a meditation this morning from Listening to Your Life by Frederich Buechner and he was making a point of differentiating joy from happiness. Happiness, he said, is man-made and one of the highest achievements of which we are capable (a happy home, a happy marriage, etc.). And he goes on to speak of joy:

But we never take credit for our moments of joy because we know that they are not man-made and that we are never really responsible for them. They come when they come. They are always sudden and quick and unrepeatable. The unspeakable joy sometimes of just being alive. The miracle sometimes of being just who we are with the blue sky and the green grass, the faces of our friends and the waves of the ocean, being just what they are. The joy of release, of being suddenly well when before we were sick, of being forgiven when before we were ashamed and afraid, of finding ourselves loved when we were lost and alone. The joy of love, which is the joy of the flesh as well of the spirit. But each of us can supply his own moments, so just two more things. One is that joy is always all-encompassing, there is nothing of us left over to hate with or to be afraid with, to feel guilty with or to be selfish about. Joy is where the whole being is pointed in one direction, and it is something that by its nature a man never hoards but always wants to share. The second thing is that joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes.

Listening to Your Life by Frederich Buechner

Reading this made me think of my most recent moment of joy. It was last night. My kids and I had gone for an after dinner walk to see some cool mushrooms that my daughter had found. But in the 2 hours since she’d discovered them and I took a photo, they’d been removed. Then it started raining and my son fell down and scraped up his palms. The whole escapade was a little bit of a disaster.

So we got cleaned up, ready for bed and snuggled on my bed reading books. As I got off the bed and as I turned to pick up my son, I bent over him pretending (but not having to pretend much) that I was too tired to carry him to his bed. We all dissolved into laughter, me bent over like that, my son folded underneath me, my daughter on the bed beside him.

And we laughed all the way into his bedroom where we all sang, even my toddler, Brahms Lullaby as he settled into his crib.